Ruderal | Pratiksha Malayil

Everything is sharp and ready and it keeps living 

in the before. It was a way of letting people know 

I had not become a product 

of the houses turned to shops on the corners 

across from the chains and train stations

When I lived there, I wanted less hair and words 

that twisted my tongue the same; eyes and skin

that would blister when the sun hit 

The pizza place we wanted to stop by had goats

in the space beside it 

a few years back and we would gaze through 

the screen dreaming of waves of sound and wind and teeth

crunching through the grass while our eyes met 

The drive back home was stopped 

in an empty field where the goats were too much 

over the years and taken by different homes 

where we held a garlic knot with two hands and prayed over it. 

We stayed for a life where we didn’t have to 

hope 

My grandparents are home and I look to both 

shoulders and away. I am 

blonde, but old and gray, and disgraceful – 

my mother tailors all my sentences as I say them.

Everything shifts around again, not like when 

I was reading verse in a different language, with conviction – 

hanging onto dying praise, remembrance and now 

within these walls – decaying, enough to 

hope the artificial in my voice was 

reminiscent of a natural lexicon somewhere but it is 

the sound of the cars mixed with the mountains 

with the goats in-between silent so soft so 

everything is missing and 

I can try to stand in a dialectal with a pit 

in my stomach 

defending myself, defending 

sounds I do not believe in.

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Pratiksha Malayil is a senior majoring in Public Health at the University at Albany, from Long Island, New York. Her work explores systems and liminality, tracing lived experience between the physical and the abstract as it emerges through the tenderness of the everyday, the responsibility of attention. You can find more of her work on Instagram @pratikshamalayil.